And not just in any TV show, either, but in some of the most culturally defining dramas of their time.

He played Benjamin Linus, the mercurial leader of the Others and an all-world neurotic, for five of Lost’s six seasons, winning the 2009 Emmy in the process. He played serial killer William Hinks, another all-world neurotic, in a recurring role in David E. Kelley’s The Practice in 2001, and won an Emmy for that as well.

He currently plays moody, mercurial recluse Harold Finch in the paranoia-driven techno-thriller Person of Interest. Finch is an agoraphobe and former high-tech billionaire who is uncomfortable around people and panicky in crowds. Finch is a perfect fit for an allegorical crime drama about mass surveillance and its misuses, having invented a computer program that theoretically predicts crimes before they happen.

Michael Emerson in Person of Interest

Finch is not the most well-adjusted hero figure on prime-time television, though. He’s squirrelly and given to panic attacks. He relies on his partner in crime-fighting, retired CIA operative John Reese, played by Jim Caviezel, to do the heavy lifting, where fighting crime is concerned.

Emerson, a career stage actor who has appeared in plays opposite Uma Thurman, Kevin Spacey and Kevin Spacey, fell into Lost by chance. His character was to originally appear briefly, and then disappear. Instead, in one of those moments of happenstance that often characterizes successful, long-running TV dramas, the character of Ben Linus became the series’ main antagonist, Lost’s Iago to Matthew Fox’s Jack Shephard.

Emerson, speaking by phone from Toronto, said he has yet to put Lost out of his mind. He doubts he ever will.

“I haven’t really digested that whole experience,” he said. “I’ve been thinking even more about it in recent months. It’s really interesting, but I think I like the show better the more I think about it. I think it did break new ground, and it had a ripple effect. It played with the narrative process; it presented the audience with an esoteric view of time and space and things like that, in a way they hadn’t seen before. And I think the audience paid it back with this incredible affection and fervour that has never really gone away.”

Michael Emerson in Person of Interest

Person of Interest debuted 10 years almost to the day after the 9/11 terror attacks, and its twitchy, nervous take on life in a CCTV camera-dominated world has found a willing audience. Person of Interest is one of the few broadcast network dramas flexible enough to warrant repeats throughout the summer. It airs Tuesdays on CBS on the U.S., and CTV in Canada.

Production resumes on its fourth season next month in New York.

With the recent WikiLeaks disclosures, the U.K. phone-hacking scandal and growing disquiet over drone attacks in faraway countries, Person of Interest has reflected the times in occasionally uncanny, prescient ways, Emerson says.

Michael Emerson in Lost

“When the NSA story broke I thought, ‘Oh, wow, now real events have caught up with us.’ It’s double-edged, though, because now we’re very topical and the writers can no longer write it from the point-of-view of it being fiction. In a way, the real world has forced itself on us. And now the real world has to be incorporated into our stories in more subtle ways. Because of what the audience now knows.”

Emerson’s first love is the stage, but the small screen is a good place to be right now.

“It’s partly the way the pendulum swings, in the world of the arts. I do think we’re living through a second or even third golden age of television, and I think it hasn’t been lost on people that no matter what medium they’re working in, whether it’s stage or screen, that TV has a lot of energy right now. I do think the best writers, the more visionary work, the more experimental work, is being done on the small screen. People are really watching television, and I think any actor wants more eyes on their work.”

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile